Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

When she’s settled with her drink I expect her to light a cigarette and wonder what Georgie’s reaction will be, but she doesn’t. She announces to anyone who may be interested that she gave up smoking three years ago, not for the sake of her lungs or her heart, but because she’s read that cigarette smoke wrinkles the skin. Then she says to me, ‘I never knew my grandfather, you know. He died ages before I was born.’

Eight years, I tell her. I know that.

‘By all accounts he was a frightful bore. I can’t think why you want to write his life.’

‘I don’t think he was boring,’ I say. ‘He was peculiar, an extraordinary man.’

‘Oh, well, chacun à son goût, ’ she says, and then Georgie brings in the Holy Grail. I’m more favourably disposed to Georgie than I’ve ever been, it must be sympathy with the underdog that has got to me, and I tell her how beautiful the baby is and how proud she must be of him.

‘I hope you’re not going to do that in public,’ says Veronica, presumably referring to an imminent suckling session. But Georgie says meekly that she’s done it already, it’s the reason for her absenting herself, feeding Galahad is what she’s been doing for the past half-hour.

Veronica says with a rudeness that takes my breath away, ‘People don’t always notice your absence, you know. You can’t be the centre of attention all the time.’

We arrange to meet later on in her stay for the interview. Going home – we’re walking because it’s such a fine night – Jude says she doesn’t envy anyone who’s going to be alone with Veronica Croft-Jones, but I tell her one good thing is that after that neither of us will ever have to see her again.

17

I’ve been re-reading the letters Mary Craddock wrote to her sister Elizabeth Kirkford. Mary lived in the Fulham Vicarage while Elizabeth was far away in Yorkshire.

The first one is dated 1923, a few months after Mary married her vicar. She writes about life in Fulham, still a place with a good many rustic open spaces, about her work in the parish and how she helps at the school. Visits to their mother are mentioned and to ‘the girls’, as she always calls her sisters, Helena and Clara. Towards them she has the typical disparaging attitude of the early twentieth-century married woman to spinsters. Plainly, in her eyes, they are ‘surplus women’, of no use in the world, and she wonders what they find to do all day.

By the time she writes again she is pregnant or, as she puts it, ‘expecting’. She feels very well, unlike Elizabeth herself who apparently suffered from morning sickness for months on end. And she makes much of this in her sharp way. Women make too much fuss about what is ‘an absolutely natural event’. But she wishes she wasn’t so far away from Mother and the girls. Presumably, the other side of London feels a long way away to her.

In April 1924 the baby is born. It is Patricia Agnew who, thirty-six years later, is to write the mystifying letter to Veronica. All the family have been to see the baby. Mary’s mother Edith stayed in the house for the confinement and was ‘a tower of strength’. In any case, she writes robustly, her labour was neither prolonged nor at all unbearable. Clara is still with her ‘to help out’. Mary thinks she and Helena will never marry. ‘They have got some nonsense into their heads about, among other things, not handing themselves body and soul over to a man.’ In any case, she goes on rather callously, it may be just as well to have come to a decision as all the suitable young men have been killed in the Great War. Clara reads their father’s books. It must be ‘showing off’ as Mary is quite sure she can’t understand them. Now, if you please, she’s saying she’d like to be a doctor herself, a notion to which no one gives serious consideration.

Her next letter is mostly about their mother Edith, Lady Nanther, who, by 1925, was in her sixties. Mother, she writes, is wonderful, always so cheerful and practical. She, Mary, still thinks it was disgraceful of Alexander to sell Ainsworth House ‘absolutely over Mother’s head, with no compunction’. It’s no joke to be obliged to move at her age but she took it so well. Of course in Mother’s eyes Alexander can do no wrong. What does Elizabeth think of his marrying ‘this American woman’? Mary believes they have been living together, which is very wrong and shocking, but at least she has money, plenty of it, and money is what Alexander is in dire need of. Mother says she’s pleased he’s found someone at last, ‘though what she means by “at last” I don’t know. He’s not yet thirty.’

The sisters’ father, dead for sixteen years, is only mentioned once more in this correspondence, and the reference comes as part of Mother-praise. ‘Of course it’s well known that only she could manage Father. He never listened to anyone else. I sometimes wonder what kind of a tyrant he would have become if he had been a less devoted husband and she not been there to teach him wisdom and tolerance.’ She adds, ‘Mother has taken up her brush again, is in fact having drawing lessons, and has produced a lovely study of little Patricia.’

From all this a picture emerges of Edith and adds a little to the build-up of Henry’s character. According to his daughter, who would surely know, he was devoted to his wife, the woman he had come to prefer over her dead sister. There’s nothing very surprising in that. I feel I’m getting to know my great-grandmother; a sensible woman, brisk and practical, with a personality strong enough to keep Henry under control. Not in awe of him, not under his thumb. A good and affectionate mother, without strong passions, unemotional, yet with a decided feeling for artistic expression. She was a photographer from the start of cameras becoming available. She took hundreds of photographs, particularly of her children and her nephews and nieces, the children of her brother Lionel. One of the remarkable things about them is that they’re not sentimental. With a few exceptions, her subjects don’t look ‘soppy’, but natural and real . And somehow she’s managed to catch the cheerful niceness of Elizabeth, her mother’s daughter, the grandeur and sharp malice of Mary, her father’s child, and in Helena and Clara a kind of mutiny that was never to take positive form. The pictures of Alexander show simply a confident contented boy, his mother’s favourite, a preference I’m sure she strove earnestly to conceal from the others. Who included, of course, George, the baby, the semi-invalid. All that shows in her photographs of him is stoicism and pain.

The portrait she made so long before of her sister I thought the only one of her drawings to survive. But I’m wondering now if the two pretty watercolours which hang in our dining room and which hung there when I inherited the house are her work. It never occurred to me before, I’ve hardly glanced at them. I go into the dining room and look at a study of what may be the Yorkshire dales near Godby and another that’s plainly Hampstead Heath. They don’t seem to be signed, or so I think at first, and then I look more closely and see a tiny E.N. in the lower right-hand corner of each. What did Edith think of her husband falling in love with her sister at first sight and when that sister died turning to her? And taking her to the same honeymoon destination as he’d planned for her sister? Perhaps she didn’t mind. She wanted a husband, she wanted children, and a wealthy successful eminent husband was on offer. I’m sure she came to love him. And he came to love her deeply, as we do when we depend on someone for comfort and peace of mind and security and a safe haven. She had given him too the two sons he wanted. We can be sure she never learned the story of the hit man and the set-up that led to Henry’s first calling at Keppel Street.